


To the World That Never Really Let You Be

by camwolfe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 10:52:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3807619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camwolfe/pseuds/camwolfe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rationally, he knows that it wasn't his fault. He gets that, he really does. That doesn't mean that he doesn't feel bad about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To the World That Never Really Let You Be

**Author's Note:**

> Take a look at those tags, friends! Take a good solid look and then please do not continue to read if any of those are going to be a problem for you. MAJOR self-harm trigger warning. 
> 
> Title from "Blackberry Stone" by Laura Marling.

He doesn’t let Steve see.

It’s not that he thinks that Steve can’t handle it. He can. Steve can handle a lot of things, a lot of horrible, awful things, things that would have broken anyone else years and years ago. But just because he _can_ doesn’t mean he _should_ , and it doesn’t mean that the weight of it won’t break him one day when no one else expects it.

Besides, Steve’s already doing too much for Bucky. Bucky lives in his apartment, he eats Steve’s food, he sleeps in Steve’s bed. Steve sits up with him at night, Steve pins him down when he wakes up howling from a nightmare, Steve holds him when he’s too lethargic to hold his own head up. Steve spars with him when Bucky gets too irritable and Steve stays quiet when Bucky takes his rage out on him with words and hate and every kind of vitriol that Bucky’s ever heard hurled at him in turn.

So, that’s why. That’s why Steve doesn’t need this, too. It’ll break his heart even more than it’s already been broken, and he’ll spend more time crying silently when he thinks that Bucky can’t hear him. Bucky’s already got enough guilt carved into his skin and the grooves of his hands. He doesn’t need to grieve over Steve’s grief any more than he already is.

Hiding it is difficult. It is, he can’t lie to himself. He doesn’t like covering his skin up. He doesn’t like wrapping himself in layer upon layer of Steve’s old clothes. He doesn’t like having barriers separating his skin from Steve’s. And he certainly doesn’t like pain. He’s had more than his fair share of a lifetime of pain. His mind isn’t warped enough (yet) to think that he deserves more of it.

Here he is, curled on the cool bathroom floor at 3:57 in the morning. Steve’s asleep, sprawled out on his back in their bed. Bucky can hear his breathing from here. Steve’s under deep enough now that he won’t wake up when he hears Bucky moving around. The first few hours of the night always includes Steve tossing and turning restlessly, twitching whenever Bucky even so much as fidgets. It takes hours of Bucky lying perfectly still and calm before Steve will finally allow himself to let go and slip down, sinking under in a moment of weakness that he doesn’t allow himself the rest of the day.

That’s how Bucky got here now. He’d spent the last two nights awake, and he’d been so exhausted tonight that he’d just pressed himself against Steve’s back and fallen asleep. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours before he was awake again, heart pounding and eyes flashing with remembered images.

His soft cotton t-shirt was sitting next to him on the floor, and the knife that he’d taken from the kitchen was pressed neatly against his chest. The knife’s handle fit oddly in his metal hand, the plastic making a nasty sort of hiss as it scraped against his fingers.

Bucky leaned his head back against the wall and stared up at the flat ceiling. He let his vision blur and watched as images from his jagged memory slid in to replace it.

He hadn’t known why that man had to die from a knife wound to the chest. He hadn’t asked. It wasn’t relevant. They would have told him, if it had been. It wasn’t like he’d cared, anyway. It didn’t matter to him, as long as he did it properly.

And he had, of course. The man (couldn’t have been much older than Bucky, kept his hair neatly combed and his shirt impeccably ironed) had screamed and cried, crawling backwards into a corner when he’d recognized Bucky standing in the corner of his bedroom. He’d wiggled so much even after the knife had gone in that Bucky had been forced to pin him against the wall with his hands as the man bled out, his dark eyes fixed on Bucky’s the entire time. Bucky hadn’t blinked.

Now, back in the present in Steve’s bathroom in Steve’s apartment, Bucky grits his teeth and presses the knife into his skin. It hurts, but not too badly. He’s had worse. He doesn’t go too deep, either. He knows exactly where all of the vital organs and arteries and veins and tendons are in a person’s body. He isn’t going to go too far. Not nearly far enough to kill himself. He would never do that to Steve.

He gasps silently as he pulls the knife out of his skin again, leaving a cut just a few inches long on his chest. He forces his hand to loosen on the knife, and then watches as blood drips down onto his stomach.

Eventually he gets up and pulls the first-aid kit out from under the sink. He neatly sews up the cut and covers it with a bandage, the bleeding already starting to slow. He tugs his t-shirt back on and then his hoodie. He puts the first-aid kit back and turns off the bathroom light, making his way quietly back through the apartment.

He crawls back into bed, Steve’s eyes opening halfway as he does so.

“You okay?” Steve mumbles automatically.

“Fine,” Bucky says quietly. “Just wanted some water.”

Steve’s eyes slide closed again. Bucky tucks himself under Steve’s arm and closes his eyes, the stinging pain on his chest already receding.

 

The scar is there in the morning, when Bucky goes to take a shower. It already looks days old, and it’ll match all the others pretty soon.

 

The next one comes back to him as he’s washing the dishes a few days later. Steve’s unloading the dishwasher next to him, humming something tunelessly under his breath.

Bucky’s hands are buried in soapy water when it flickers through his mind. Something about the bubbles and the ripples reminds him of that river, the way it roared its way through the canyon in places but simmered quietly in others.

“Is everything okay?” Steve asks from behind him. Bucky doesn’t know how he does it, sometimes. He doesn’t think that he’s moved at all or shown any outward signs of what’s happening, but Steve somehow just knows.

“Yeah,” Bucky replies. He resumes scrubbing at the frying pan.

 

Later that night, he tells Steve that he’s going to take a bath. It’s not a lie, and Steve doesn’t question it.

Bucky locks the door behind him and turns the tap on. He sits down next to the bathtub and watches as the cold water starts to fill it. When it’s done, he strips his clothes off and gets in.

This is much worse than the sting from the knife. Bucky hates the cold, he really does. He especially hates being submerged in it, but what can you do.

He sits down, every nerve in his body screaming at him to do the opposite. He vows to do this quickly. It hadn’t taken that woman (older, thin, unsuspecting) long to drown, after all. No reason to prolong something if it didn’t need to be prolonged.

He ducks his head back and keeps his eyes open as the painful water covers him. It wavers in front of his eyes, and he wants to scream but Steve will hear and besides, the woman hadn’t been able to scream. She’d tried, but screaming takes a lot of air out of your lungs (Bucky had learned this first-hand early on), and when you’re being drowned it’s really in your best interest to conserve that.

He waits until his lungs’ protest is stronger than his brain’s before he sits up. He makes himself take slow breaths in, because if he starts gasping for air like he wants to then Steve will hear and get worried.

When his vision has cleared again and his heart isn’t pounding anymore, Bucky washes his hair and scrubs himself down with soap and then gets out.

He puts his layers of clothes back on and dries his messy hair. He goes straight back into bed. Steve follows him into the bedroom a few minutes later, frowning.

“I’m okay,” Bucky says, before he can ask. “Just cold.”

Steve doesn’t question it, because sometimes Steve does the same thing. Steve hates the cold just as much or maybe even more than Bucky does. Instead, he just turns up the heat and then climbs into bed with Bucky, wrapping his arms around him and burrowing his face in the crook of Bucky’s neck.

 

It bothers him, not letting Steve see his body. He knows that it bothers Steve, too, although Steve would never say anything about it. Bucky’s pretty sure that Steve think he’s ashamed of his arm and of his scars, which is only partially true. If Steve sees the network of scars covering the entirety of Bucky’s body, he’s going to want to say something about it and he’s definitely going to notice the newer ones. The ones that clearly are not from a fight or a bullet.

Bucky just doesn’t want to talk about it.

So, he just doesn’t let Steve get a good look at his skin. He keeps as many of his clothes on as he can when they fuck, and certainly never takes his shirt off. He doesn’t let Steve blow him, even though it bothers Steve when Bucky won’t let him return the favour.

Bucky wants it, really. He wants to let Steve rip his clothes off and he wants the feeling of his skin against Steve’s. Even with all sex-related things aside, he wants to be able to curl up with Steve at night and feel the heat of Steve’s body against his.

But Bucky isn’t ready for the questions. He doesn’t want to talk about the way the metal meets his skin and the lacerations on his back and the surgical cuts on his stomach. He knows that if he asked Steve not to, Steve wouldn’t say a single thing about it.

He also just doesn’t want Steve to know about it.

 

The next time it happens, it’s bad. It takes everything he has to hide it from Steve. Even then, it doesn’t really work.

They’re out jogging. Well, Sam is jogging. Bucky and Steve are running.

One minute, Bucky’s listening to Steve and Sam talking and the next he’s listening to the sound of the forest floor cracking under his feet as he chases the girl. He’d really hated this, even while it was happening. He’d had enough presence of mind, then, to feel sorry for her. She’d tried so hard. She was fast, too, sprinting her way through the dark woods almost faster than Bucky. The girl (a teenager, probably no older than sixteen at the most, dark hair and gangly limbs) was crying as she ran, her sobs punctuating her rhythmic gasps for air. Bucky was almost crying too as he chased her. She was trying so hard, she was so, _so_ desperate to live. She still had that teenage naïveté where she couldn’t understand that this was it, that these were her last few moments. She still thought she was immortal, that death couldn’t possibly be coming for her (Bucky personally had lost that on his first day overseas). Bucky had cried over her body once he caught her, painful sobs that wracked his chest and gave him a headache. He’d pulled himself together by the time he’d walked back to the rendezvous point, of course. Stoicism was a mask that Bucky did well.

Anyway, here in the present, Bucky slows to a stop.

Steve and Sam stop too, Sam bracing his hands on his knees. Steve watches Bucky warily.

“I… need a minute,” Bucky says slowly. “I think I’m gonna run for a while by myself. I’ll meet you back at home.”

“You sure?” Steve asks. He looks worried. Probably concerned that Bucky is going to just take off again and not come back. To be fair, Bucky had done that a lot at the beginning. Bucky had heard one of Steve’s friends describe him as a “dog off the leash for the first time.”  

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I might even beat you home.”

Steve smiles a little at that, but he still shares a glance with Sam.

“Just don’t lap us,” Sam says easily. “My dignity can only take so much.”

Bucky nods and takes off, pacing himself until he’s well out of their sight. He speeds up then, his muscles starting to strain.

He keeps going, pushing harder and harder until his heart is hammering too strongly and the burn in his muscles had turned into pain. He slows to a stop eventually, and when he can breathe again he jogs home slowly. Sure enough, he beats Steve home and uses too much of the hot water in the shower before Steve can get in. Steve complains, of course, and Bucky laughs and flicks water from his damp hair at him. Steve doesn’t seem to really mind.

 

The next time it happens is just as bad. Bucky does his best to keep this one a secret from Steve, but he’s tired and Steve has good hearing, especially where Bucky is concerned.

They obviously don’t keep poison in the apartment, but Bucky knows countless ways (literally, he tries counting but loses track) to make his own. He doesn’t make it deadly (he’d made it deadly for the diplomat, the man who’d died in bed with his wife and his kids in the next room), but it makes him sick as all hell anyway.

Steve finds him curled in the bathroom as the sun is just starting to creep through their windows. Bucky has his face pressed against the cool tile, his sweaty hair stuck to his face.

“Bucky?” Steve says, his voice too sharp and too unsteady. He kneels down next to Bucky and pulls him up easily, somehow not jostling Bucky as he settles him against his chest.

“Hey,” Bucky says hoarsely, and winces. His throat is raw from throwing up.

“What happened?” Steve asks. He reaches over and grabs a facecloth from the cupboard, resettling Bucky in his arms as he stretches to run it under the tap. Bucky can’t help but groan as Steve lays the cool facecloth over his forehead. Nothing has ever felt this good, ever.

“Bucky,” Steve says again. “You didn’t answer.”

Bucky shrugs listlessly. “Dunno.”

Steve sighs, his arms clenched a little too tightly around Bucky. Bucky doesn’t mind.

 

He accidentally hurts Steve a few weeks later. It breaks his goddamn heart.

He’s in the kitchen, getting himself a glass of orange juice, and he doesn’t hear Steve come in. Steve’s arm brushes against Bucky’s back, and Bucky just turns and instinctively backhands Steve with his metal arm.

Steve catches himself on the counter before he hits the cupboards, but he still ends up with blood streaming from the back of his head and a huge bump on his skull.

Steve immediately starts apologizing frantically as Bucky stares at him. Bucky turns and walks calmly into their bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

He can’t get the right angle on his head, so he just hits himself hard enough on the leg to leave a deep enough bruise (it ends up staying for over a week, which is a new record).

Then, Bucky gets back up and walks out to the kitchen and apologizes sheepishly to Steve for hitting him. He gets the frozen peas out of the freezer and makes Steve sit on the couch and hold them against his head for the rest of the afternoon. Bucky ignores the throbbing pain in his leg.

 

It isn’t Steve who catches him during the next one. It’s Natasha, and it’s fucking annoying.

They’re standing in the rubble of a building that got destroyed during the fight. Steve is off with Stark and Sam and probably some of the others, dealing with the power-crazy senator who’d caused this problem in the first place.

Bucky finishes helping a group of people crawl out from under a slab of cement, and then leans against it and takes a breath. It’s quiet now, the screaming has mostly faded away and the paramedics and police have it all in hand.

He has a bullet wound in his stomach. It had been a lucky shot from a sniper on the other roof (he’d died with one of Hawkeye’s arrows through his neck the moment the bullet hit Bucky). The bullet hadn’t even been meant for Bucky, but it wasn’t Bucky’s fault if Steve was painfully bad at keeping his shield over himself instead of over others during a fight.

Steve is pissed at him, Bucky knows, and they’ll probably have a fight about it when they get home later. For now, it’s just bleeding sluggishly all over Bucky’s nice new clothes.

It doesn’t hurt. It will later, but Bucky never feels his injuries during battle. It works just fine for him and he sees no reason to try and reverse it, even though it upsets Steve to no end.

Bucky blinks, and he’s watching a woman sorting through apples in a grocery store. She reaches for one at the top of the pile and Bucky pulls the trigger.

She drops, and he’s already moving and gone.

Now, here in the settling dust of a too-dramatic and too-bloody fight, he presses his metal fingers into the cloth covering his wound and finally feels the deep ache of the bullet embedded in his body.

When he looks up, Natasha is standing in front of him. She has blood matted in her hair and she’s keeping her weight off her right ankle, but her eyes are sharp and her arms are crossed.

Bucky takes his hand away from his wound. It starts bleeding again.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Is that working?”

“Not really.”

“Didn’t think so,” she says. “It won’t. Just so you know.”

Bucky has nothing to say to that. She doesn’t seem to expect an answer.

She doesn’t tell Steve, though. It’s nice of her.

 

He killed a lot of people with fire.

It’s easy to cause a fire. It’s easy to make it look like it was an accident. It was really his go-to method for getting rid of a target. A knocked-over candle, an errant spark from a fireplace, a dropped cigarette. After that, it was just a matter of making sure that no one escaped.

He’d usually just wander around the perimeter and enjoy being outside for once, ignoring the heat from the flames and the heavy smoke rushing around him.

All it took this morning was the smell of a cigarette from a man walking by Bucky in the street. Bucky has spent every minute since then blinking back the images of two parents desperately trying to get their kids out of the house in time. The woman had seen Bucky, had reached out her hands and waved frantically, clearly begging him for help.

Bucky hadn’t even turned away. Her screams hadn’t bothered him at all.

They bothered him now.

Steve is sprawled out on their bed, reading a book that Bucky bought him the day before. Bucky is in the living room, fidgeting and trying to breathe. It’s driving him crazy. He can’t get it out of his head, he can’t stop thinking about how young that woman’s daughter had been, she’d been just a baby really, she hadn’t done anything to deserve what Bucky had done to her.

He tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling, his metal hand pressing against his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he says silently, to no one. He whispers it under his breath as he gets up and walks into the kitchen, too quietly for Steve to hear.

He turns the stove on. He waits for it to heat up and opens one of the cupboards in the meantime. Steve will be able to hear this, but he’ll just think Bucky’s making lunch.

He wonders what that family ate for lunch that day. He doesn’t know if the parents knew what was coming for them. Probably not, if they still had their kids with them.

Bucky waits for another minute and then presses his right hand against the burner.

It _hurts._ It hurts so fucking much. Bucky hates it.

Every nerve in his body is fighting him. His instincts are trying to get him to pull his hand away. He has to take his left hand and press it over his right to keep it there. It hurts so much that it doesn’t even really feel like anything anymore.

It hurts when Steve slams into him and knocks him back against the cupboards. Bucky grits his teeth and cradles his hand protectively against his chest, even as Steve tries to grab his wrist.

“What the hell?” Steve says. He’s angry. Or upset. Probably both. Bucky has a hard time telling the two apart, sometimes. “Bucky, what the fuck are you doing?”

Bucky doesn’t really know how to answer. It was pretty clear what he was doing. He sits down on the floor instead, letting his knees give out. His muscles are tired now.

Steve kneels down in front of him, still trying to get a hold of Bucky’s wrist. “What did you do that for? Bucky, let me see.”

“It’s fine,” Bucky says, but his face is almost pressed into the cupboard and it comes out kind of muffled.

“It’s – it’s not fine!” Steve nearly shouts. He hauls Bucky back to his feet and drags him over to the sink. Bucky could get free if he really wanted to, but he doesn’t.

Steve nearly breaks the tap in his haste to get the cold water running. He pulls Bucky’s left hand away from his other wrist. Bucky lets him.

The water hurts as it hits his skin, but it hurt without the water so it doesn’t really matter.

Steve is still talking. “Bucky, why’d you do this?”

Bucky shrugs.

“No,” Steve says desperately. “Don’t just… don’t just brush this off like you do everything else. I saw you doing this to yourself, I could smell your skin burning – “

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. He stares at the water falling from the faucet. It’s kind of hypnotizing.

“Bucky,” Steve says, and he sounds so broken that Bucky finally looks up. “I… I don’t know what else to do, I don’t know how to help you. I’m trying so hard, Buck, but I can’t… I don’t know what to do.”

Bucky looks back at the water, rather than try and hold Steve’s gaze again. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“I can’t stand by and watch you destroy yourself like this!”

“I’m not destroying myself,” Bucky says, a little indignantly. “If I wanted to do that, I already would’ve.”

Steve braces his elbows on the counter and drops his head down. He’s still holding Bucky’s hand firmly under the water.

Bucky flinches when he sees tears starting to run down Steve’s face.

“No,” he says hurriedly. “Steve, it’s fine, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, I promise.”

Steve shakes his head, but he stands up again and wraps his free arm around Bucky’s shoulders. He pulls him against his chest, letting Bucky rest his head on his shoulder.

“Just tell me how to help you,” Steve says quietly, his voice thick.

Bucky takes a deep breath in. “I don’t think… I don’t think you can.”

 

Bucky’s hand heals after a few days. It’s tender for a while after that, but it’s nothing he can’t handle.

Steve’s a mess, though, and it breaks Bucky’s heart. Steve tries to keep it together when Bucky’s around him, but it’s not like Bucky can’t hear his late night phone calls to Sam. It’s not like Bucky can’t see him sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

The world’s already hurt Steve enough. Bucky doesn’t want to add to that.

The next time it happens (a politician’s wife, young and happy and wearing a pink dress), Bucky’s first reaction is to go at his own wrist with a kitchen knife, just like he’d done to her.

But he doesn’t want to hurt Steve again, and he doesn’t really want to hurt himself, either. He caused enough pain in the world. He doesn’t want to cause more, even if it’s just against himself.

He wakes Steve up instead. He climbs back into the warm bed next to him and gently puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder.

Steve wakes up immediately.

“What’s wrong?” he mumbles, starting to sit up. Bucky gently presses him back down onto the pillows.

“Can I tell you something?” Bucky asks quietly. He lays his head down on the pillow next to Steve’s.

“Of course,” Steve says automatically.

“It’s pretty horrible.”

“Okay,” Steve says evenly. He watches Bucky without blinking.

Bucky tells him. Steve looks sad as Bucky describes how he killed that woman in the pretty dress, but he doesn’t say anything until Bucky’s done.

“It’s not – “ Steve starts to say, but Bucky shakes his head quietly.

“Don’t,” he says. “That’s not… that’s not what this is about, okay? I don’t need you to tell me about how it isn’t my fault. I just… wanted to tell you.”

Steve looks like he’s physically biting his tongue, but he nods.

Bucky closes his eyes. After a few minutes of quiet, Steve shifts over and wraps his arm around Bucky’s waist. He pulls him closer, his breath ruffling Bucky’s hair gently.

It’s better, Bucky thinks. Doing it this way. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.

 

**Author's Note:**

> YO let me know what you thought!!!
> 
> I'm on tumblr [here](http://cameronwolfe.tumblr.com)


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